


Pocketwatch

by May



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Gen, Historical AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-03
Updated: 2013-07-03
Packaged: 2017-12-17 14:40:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/868704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/May/pseuds/May
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“It’s time, itself.” He smiles at you, with a crinkle of his eyes and it’s the kind of smile you give a fool who can’t tell his right foot from his left. “Time moves us forward. Pushes us. Maps out our fates.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pocketwatch

It’s a new addition, threaded back into his pocket and hooked onto his waistcoat. He grips it in his small, neat hands – small hands for a man, you’ve always thought – and clicks it open with an elegant flick of his thumb.

“Damara,” he says. “Damara, do you know what this is?”

You look at the dial he shows you and listen to its repetitive tick. “Yes.”

He clicks it shut and slips it back into his pocket, and then adjusts his coat over it. He offers you his arm and you take a moment to thread yours through it. You are not his wife and you resent other people thinking you are. You told him this once, and all he had to say to you was that there were worse fates out there for you than the one that had fallen to you. He has told you that he could show you, if you really wanted to know.

“It’s time, itself.” He smiles at you, with a crinkle of his eyes and it’s the kind of smile you give a fool who can’t tell his right foot from his left. “Time moves us forward. Pushes us. Maps out our fates.”

You nod and then roll your eyes. You’ve seen him talk round young women too clever than they’re really allowed to be and the lonely sons of distant noblemen, all looking for a convenience to slide open right before their eyes. 

He paves those paths with fine honey, and so holds the fates of those youths in his hands. He doesn’t always bother talking to you like that – you are his, after all. Where would you be if you were not his ward? Sometimes, though, the urge seems to take him.

You nod. You aren’t one of his girls, striving to match him. You know that none of them really would to begin with. He’s still higher than them. He’s higher than everybody, and with a smooth word, footsteps click off towards some doom or other. Your own doom is fated, too, and has been from when he got you. Unlike anybody else, however, you were never allowed a turning point.

“Whatever shall be, shall be,” he continues. “All we can do is look towards the end.”

He stops, unhooks his arm from yours and takes hold of the lapels of his coat. “At least, most people assume that.” He looks over at you – you are taller than him, now – and takes you in. “Most people will blindly walk their footsteps towards their end, never aware of how much they were intended to do that in the first place.”

You slip into dark rooms. You slit throats, you steal gewgaws.

“Few people think to try to change what looks inevitable,” he says. “Few of them know that there’s a path just out of the way. They can disdain time, itself, if they just take the right choice. You know this, don’t you, Damara?”

He reaches up one hand and smooths it down your bound hair. “You know, don’t you?” He smiles, like he knows he holds the key to your very existence. “I am the very reason you aren’t dead. Your timeline would have spiraled off quickly if it hadn’t been for me finding you.”

You say nothing. Later, you will convene with a reckless boy taken on for his desperate lack of faith and a sharp, mercurial girl who would rip whole institutions apart from the inside. You’ll make the town what he wants it to be. But, perhaps, only for now.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the HSWC - Historical prompts - 1510 - the invention of the pocket watch by German inventor Peter Henlein


End file.
